So I get to Bologna at 1pm, take a cab to my hotel, and immediately sleep for 4 hours, having weird vivid dreams, the kind that disorient you for hours after. Then I get up, planning to wander around for a bit and then get dinner and come back to my room, since I leave so early in the morning, and I am really only here to fly home. So I walk through 5000 columns and arches to the main square, which is full on medieval and churchly and crazy, and it's all so thick with cars and scooters and people against this intense backdrop, and I wander all around and sit for a while on this piazza, and I watch this man play fetch with his mad little dog who looks like a miniature reindeer and I watch these tiny children chasing pigeons and I watch the lights start to flicker on because it's dusk now, and the city starts to take on this magical tone as lights appear behind these shimmering church windows and on top of the buiildings, and after a while I start to head back the way that I came but I happen upon this whole display of comic strips behind glass, whole rows of them showing this girl character in all these different cities, and it seems so weird and out of place and I'm looking at them and then this beautiful beautiful man keeps walking by staring at me and tho I'm usually pretty mental this guy affects me, and I feel sort of woozy, and we keep watching each other while walking through this display and it's like something out of a movie, and he's very intense, the way he's watching me, like it's not the way a guy normally checks you out, and we do this dance for a while and then I walk away, start heading back, but he follows, and eventually he approaches me and we talk and we end up walking around, all around the city, and then we get some wine in this sleek bar with black couches and then we're holding hands and then we be making out in the street and this whole time we're talking about all this intense stuff, like his parents' deaths and my parents' health, and our health, and God, and what we want in life, and what makes us sad, and it's all very stark and bare bones because he speaks bad English and I speak bad Italian so you sort of just have to get to the point, and he says all this stuff that really hits me, and he's my same age and some of what we talk about is very painful, and it's also all quite loving and strange, and he's stroking my hair and kissing my forehead and basically it's one of those weird random connections that hits so hard it done seems like a sign straight down from above. And when he left mah hotel a few hours later, yes I admit it, I'm teary and he says "What is wrong, do you love me now?" which is really quite charming and I laugh but that is not at all the case, I'm glad that I met him and I'm glad that he's left and I think it's the kind of thing that will make my life sligghttly different from the way it would have been otherwise. But maybe that be true of everything.

In other news, here I am in a city famous for its chow and I don't get no dinner.